companies
Jim Day
THE London-based lawyers who recently won more than R9-million for workers poisoned by mercury contamination in KwaZulu-Natal have launched a suit against a British company that ran asbestos mines in South Africa.
Richard Meeran, a solicitor with Leigh, Day & Co, has filed proceedings against Cape plc of Middlesex, the parent of two South African subsidiaries: Egnep, which ran the Penge Mine near Burgersfort in the Northern Province until 1979, and Cape Blue, which ran asbestos operations in the north-west Cape Province until 1964.
No sum of damages has been specified. The attorneys represent seven claimants from the two operations who developed lung diseases related to asbestos exposure.
Asbestosis is an untreatable and potentially fatal lung disease which causes shortness of breath. Inhaling asbestos fibres can lead to lung cancer and mesothelioma – a particularly dangerous lung cancer that can take 40 years to develop.
Asbestos was used widely in the past for insulation, cement, brake pads and thousands of other things.
Although the victims and the mining were all in South Africa, the claimants maintain that Cape plc developed the technology, was fully aware of the conditions at the mines and had the final say in the operations.
“The key decisions were made in Britain,” Meeran told the Mail & Guardian from his London office. “They had the power to protect the victims.”
Meerans last week won R9,4-million in damages and costs for 20 workers who said they were poisoned at the Cato Ridge plant of the UK-owned company, Thor Holdings. Their claim was lodged in 1992.
Lawyers for Cape plc were unavailable for comment this week. But they are expected to object to Meeran’s case on the grounds of jurisdiction: they will maintain that as the activities occurred in South Africa, it is inappropriate to hear the case in a British court.
This issue will come before court in the next few weeks. If the court agrees to hear the case, it will take two to three years to be decided, Meeran predicted.
The South African National Centre for Occupational Health and the National Union of Mineworkers have lent support to the claimants bringing the case.
That asbestos causes severe health problems was well-known even before Britain enacted regulations in 1931 to protect people against exposure to the fibres.
South Africa enacted asbestos regulations in 1954, but these were routinely flouted, and workers continued to be exposed to levels hundreds of times what was widely considered acceptable.
One study of black asbestos workers at the Penge Mine who died between 1959 and 1964 showed that 80% had asbestosis. Their average life expectancy was 43.
No one knows how many people suffer from asbestos-related diseases in the Northern Province mining area.
But Tony Davies, professor-emeritus of occupational health at the University of the Witwatersrand, who has studied lung diseases in the region for years, talks in terms of hundreds of thousands.
Many miners were migrants from Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique who spent years covered in asbestos dust in the mines, only to return home to wheeze their lives away.
Davies has heard of entire communities in Zambia today, where former asbestos miners who worked in South Africa are dying of lung diseases. But such communities seldom have the means to document such diseases.